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Sunday, December 21, 2014

Egypt Disputes 'Million Mummy' Discovery - Ministry of Antiquities orders work to stop at site, slams US team for making a 'million mummies' announcement. Says claims are false.

The Egyptian antiquities ministry has decided to halt its cooperation
with an American mission working near Fayoum after accusing the mission
of making false statements about the discovery of a necropolis.

According to a ministry statement, the decision comes after the Brigham
Young University mission gave false information to a British newspaper
about its excavations in Fag Al-Gamous village in Upper Egypt.

The BYU mission announced that its excavators were working in an
ancient necropolis dating back some 2,000 years which contains an
estimated one million burials. Press reports described the burials as
mummies.

The mission has been working on the site for 28 years.
Head of the ministry's ancient Egyptian antiquities department, Youssef
Khalifa, told Ahram Online that the statement made by the American
mission is “unfounded.”

He said that only one mummy has been unearthed at the site, in 1980,
and it is now on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. What the
mission has discovered, he continued, are thousands of human skeletons
and remains of human bones which are very poorly conserved.

Khalifa also stated that the mission had failed to respect the
ministry’s regulations and had broken the law, which stipulates that no
foreign mission is allowed to announce a discovery without the approval
of the ministry’s permanent committee.